Stamen's Big Idea: Blankets Made From Open-Source Maps of the World

We asked Stamen, an award-winning design and technology studio in San Francisco, for its smartest new innovation. Here is what they gave us.

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Soft Cities is a San Francisco-based company that sells blankets and
napkins. Sounds pretty standard.

But actually, there's something quite cool about these blankets and napkins. You can custom-print them to feature a street map of your favorite location, like a college campus, hometown, or far-away city. Working with Stamen Design, an award-winning tech-and-map design firm in the Bay area, it uses open-source software to access a kind of "world-wide Wikipedia for maps" and turns it into custom textiles of any neighborhood you want.

"This kind of business model, where open data
projects run by volunteers both support and see benefit from their
involvement with commercial entities, is super interesting, and I think
we're going to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the future," Stamen told me in an email.

"We're also working on two open source projects of our own--ModestMaps
and CityTracking--that make it easier for designers and the public to
tell stories with data. What's exciting about these is that they also
make it easier for us at Stamen to tell stories with data; since they're
open source, we can use them in our commercial projects as well as
exhibitions for galleries and museums."

Want to share your company's best idea -- or your own! -- for our Best Ideas series? Leave your idea in the comment section or email me a description and a photograph at dthompson@theatlantic.com.